SAN FRANCISCO — Robert Xavier Burden used to paint nudes, but nearly a decade ago he shifted his eye from bare flesh to another sort of fetish. Now he spends thousands of hours creating massive, and massively nerdy, oil paintings of toys from his youth.

You might think his switch from naked human models to tiny action figures would make life a lot simpler for the San Francisco artist, but you’d be wrong.

“I’m hesitant to use the word ‘easy,’ just because of the fact that making these paintings is ludicrous, you know?” Burden told Wired during a recent interview here in his warehouse studio, which is packed with paintings that can reach more than 10 feet tall. “But I also don’t think that they work on a small scale. I think if it is about sort of recapturing a sense of childhood wonderment and awe, there is this idea that maybe these things should tower over you — that if you walk into a gallery, they should be a little bit overwhelming.”

Burden’s growing body of work — inspired by images taken from comic books, blockbuster movies, television shows and ultimately from the plastic creations shoved onto the shelves of toy stores everywhere — is more than just an attempt to cash in on the swelling interest in nerdy art. For the painter, it’s an exploration of nostalgia and the sense of lost wonder that comes with leaving behind childish pursuits.

Robert Burden at his studio in San Francisco. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

“In a painting that I’m going to spend 1,200 hours on, I don’t want it to be just a cheap joke,” he said. “This is really about the love that I have for these things, the beauty that I saw in these things as a kid.”

His oil paintings, which he spends hundreds of hours on a ladder to create, elevate common toys almost to the level of religious artifacts. One of his latest — The Holy Batman, which will be exhibited for the first time in a San Francisco show that opens Saturday — takes Burden’s obsession with the subject matter to a whole new level. He’s crammed images of more than 50 action figures and scores of Batman references onto the 12-foot-by-7-foot canvas. Some of the visual allusions will seem obvious to anyone who’s seen The Dark Knight trilogy, while others might prove utterly inscrutable to all but the most dedicated Batman scholars.

“There’s a lot of really sort of obscure references,” Burden said. “Somebody asked me why the hell would I put Predator in there?” (It’s a reference to a DC Comics/Dark Horse crossover titled Batman Versus Predator.) Elsewhere in the gridlike composition, Disney’s Mad Hatter and The Wizard of Oz’s Scarecrow make appearances. Discerning eyes will spot nods to individuals, both real and imagined, who inspired Batman’s creators, Bob Kane and Bill Finger.

“As I was making this, I didn’t think it would turn into this, but it sort of became almost like a history of Batman,” Burden said.

It’s the most iconic subject matter Burden has tackled, and it’s also the most labor-intensive painting he’s ever produced. He started in February 2012 and finished in late November of that year, spending an estimated 1,200 hours on the painting and its elaborate frame, which is ornamented with resin Batman heads. (Burden used a die-cast toy from his youth as a mold for the decorative accents that rim the frame of The Holy Batman; for a series of paintings that link superheroes to their roots, he added framed, taxidermied animals to the images.)

“I try to log the time I spend on a painting as much as possible, just so that I can get an idea of, you know, how close to minimum wage I’m making if I sell it,” he said.

While his megapaintings can fetch between $18,000 and $25,000, Burden said his smaller pieces tend to be easier to peddle. A painting called The Snowman of Hook Mountain, a massive portrait of a peripheral character from ’80s animated show ThunderCats, is an early entry in his toy-centric series, dating back to when he was studying for his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. He’s exhibited it up and down the West Coast, he said, but it still sits in his warehouse rather than gracing the wall of an art collector.

“It’s a painting that a lot of galleries have wanted to show, but obviously being — with the attachment on the top — well over 10 feet tall, it’s not an easy one to sell,” he said.

Burden, at his San Francisco studio. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

Time Traveling in Toronto

Burden’s journey into pop-culture portraiture began with a trip to the basement of his parents’ home in suburban Toronto, where he spent some time rifling through toys he hadn’t seen in a decade. While the experience obviously proved motivational in the long-term, at the time Burden remembers feeling distinctly underwhelmed as he picked through the treasures of his youth. Things he found awesome as a kid failed to dazzle him as an adult (which is a perfectly appropriate response, he points out, although he understands what motivates adult toy collectors).

“Some people, they’re still going to have that sense of awe — and I get it, because it is kind of cool — but I remember being let down … by how much less interested I was in this stuff as an adult,” he said.

That initial disappointment turned into a burning drive to recapture his long-lost sensation of wonderment, yielding a series of paintings that turn that disillusionment into a strangely enduring reverence for the toys of his youth.

“The whole work is just about trying to get back that feeling,” Burden said. “There is kind of an odd nature to this stuff as well, that they do become little almost religious relics. They hold a lot of weight, and yet at the end of the day, it’s just a hollow piece of plastic.”

“The toys themselves survived, a lot of them, from my childhood, but the accessories sure didn’t…. Who knows where those things go? There’s probably a giant collection of tiny little guns under my parents’ porch.”

Burden has been returning to his past ever since, a nifty bit of memorabilia-fueled time travel that’s been greatly abetted by his mother.

“My mom never threw out anything,” he said. “My mom was irritated if I lost any of this stuff. I think, in a funny way, [the toys from his childhood mean] a lot to her as well, because she’s the one that — at a birthday, or at Christmas, or whatever, you know — it was obviously fun for her to see my reaction to getting this stuff.”

He remembers one gift from long ago that made a particularly memorable impression upon him: a big Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blimp that fired ooze. “I think it got ruined within a week,” he said.

While the toy quickly broke, the memory lives on. “I remember getting that because I was shocked by it, and I’m not even entirely sure I even at the time knew about the [toy’s existence],” he continued. “I think that’s what was so awesome about it — like, I saw this huge box with a blimp on it and all these Ninja Turtles hanging off of it, you know, about to jump on Shredder, and it’s like, ‘What the fuck is this awesomeness?'” he laughs. “As a kid, there’s no cursing, but it’s the same feeling — like, ‘What the hell is this?'”

Today, Burden’s got hundreds of action figures and toys in his warehouse, approximately half of which he says come from his youthful toy collection. When he needs reference material that’s not included in his own personal treasure trove, he goes to eBay and other sources.

His most expensive outlay — $160 or $170 — was for a fully complete Megatron toy that he used while painting his latest giant work, the Transformers-themed The Autobot, which will also be exhibited in Toy Box, his upcoming solo show at San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery.

“If I’m spending over 200 bucks on one toy, I start to really get a little bit antsy,” he said.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired

It’s Love, But It’s Not What You Think

Burden stresses that his paintings, which turn tiny plastic superheroes into towering immortals akin to Greek gods, are not about his love for the toys themselves.

“It’s about my love for my view of it when I was a kid,” he said, recalling the now-distant excitement he felt when he received a new plaything as a child. “I don’t really consider myself a toy collector, because if the toy was enough, I wouldn’t make the paintings. If I was still in kind of awe of the toy, and still absolutely adored the toy, then I could just put that on my shelf and that would be enough. But it’s not anymore.”

In addition to his toy-inspired paintings, Burden teaches part-time at the San Francisco Art Institute. He occasionally sells one of his pieces, and he once taught a painting class for employees at Pixar Animation Studios. (“God, I hope that some of them picked up something from that class,” laughed the self-deprecating artist.)

While he acknowledges that creating on such a massive scale can be perceived as a gimmick — after all, most of his paintings must be turned sideways to get through a normal door — he thinks the oversize treatment is crucial to propel his paintings beyond the realm of cheap illustration. “I want to make something that’s an experience in person, you know?” he said. “Paintings that are meant to be seen in person, something you are meant to stand in front of.”

At 30, he looks forward to many more years working as an artist. While the idea of producing other types of imagery appeals to him, he said he doesn’t feel like he has time to deviate from his toy-centered work and come back to it later in life. There are more childhood memories to be mined, and Burden’s projects “just keep snowballing into other bigger, grander ideas.”

“I don’t necessarily know if I feel like I have to be painting toys, but I know that it’s a body of work that I’m still, like, kind of working out of my system,” he said. “Maybe I’ll do this until I’m 85, and people will definitely call me crazy.”

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Robert Xavier Burden’s solo showToy Box(.pdf) runs May 11 through June 1 at Shooting Gallery, 886 Geary St., San Francisco.